{"id":56647,"date":"2023-04-16T09:20:50","date_gmt":"2023-04-16T08:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pley2win.com\/featured-news\/netflixs-beef-lets-its-cast-be-assholes-for-the-whole-season\/"},"modified":"2023-04-16T09:20:50","modified_gmt":"2023-04-16T08:20:50","slug":"netflixs-beef-lets-its-cast-be-assholes-for-the-whole-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/?p=56647","title":{"rendered":"Netflix\u2019s Beef lets its cast be assholes for the whole season"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

The Netflix series Beef <\/em>is a cataclysmic spiral of existential despair and self-destruction. It starts, however, with little more than a traffic altercation: Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) backs out of an LA parking lot in his crappy red truck and nearly hits a pristine white SUV. Horns are honked, words shouted, middle fingers extended. It\u2019s the sort of conflict where the participants <\/strong>tend to go on with their lives once they\u2019ve let off some steam.<\/p>\n

But for Danny and the unseen SUV driver, there\u2019s still quite a lot of steam to let off. Danny gives chase, weaving through red lights and stop signs while his adversary pelts his windshield with garbage. Once the confrontation is over and the SUV speeds away, we see that the driver is another Asian American: Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a harried entrepreneur on the verge of selling her thriving business for a huge payday. <\/p>\n

The characters in Beef <\/em>are not well-intentioned victims of circumstance who learn some sort of lesson by the end. They are allowed to be horrible and selfish and petty in ways that we rarely see outside white-centered stories, and their behavior takes on a fascinating additional layer in the context of the Asian American identity that unites them even across divisions of class and culture.<\/p>\n

In essence, the series is an extreme interpretation of something Amy\u2019s touchy-feely husband George (Joseph Lee) says: You never know what the other person is going through. Danny is a struggling handyman living out of the motel his family once owned with his layabout brother Paul (Young Mazino). George is right, in a sense, that Amy and Danny are thinking of the other only as a target for their ire rather than as a distinct person with their own life and feelings. Of course, he\u2019s also ignoring the fact that Danny tracked Amy down in the aftermath, cajoled his way into her home, and maliciously peed all over her bathroom.<\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"Danny<\/p>\n

<\/source><\/picture>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Andrew Cooper\/Netflix<\/cite><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Beef <\/em>gives its Asian Americans room to be anything but reserved and polite. We watch the imperfect coping mechanisms they\u2019ve developed, like masturbating with a gun or inhaling a distressing amount of Burger King. And then we see how, in painting one another as an unambiguous enemy, they find an outlet for the emotions they\u2019ve spent so much of their lives holding in.<\/p>\n

When Danny comes home to the cramped room he shares with Paul, he rants about the expectation to take \u201cother people\u2019s shit\u201d with a smile. It\u2019s a quality that, as an actor, Steven Yeun has built a recent career on expressing: the buried hurt of his traumatized ex-child actor in Nope<\/em>, the simmer of sociopathy in Burning<\/em>. He conveys something more going on beneath the face he presents to the world. In Beef<\/em>, Danny can\u2019t be honest even when he\u2019s otherwise being open about how he feels \u2014 he lies to his brother that he scared off the white SUV and \u201cwon\u201d the confrontation, and he spends much of the series making tiny excuses as if by instinct. (\u201cI did chest yesterday,\u201d by way of explanation for being outlifted by the plainly more athletic Paul.)<\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"Amy<\/p>\n

<\/source><\/picture>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Andrew Cooper\/Netflix<\/cite><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In Amy, too, we see the things she must ignore and the performance she must give, which similarly dovetails with Ali Wong\u2019s own career: She\u2019s essentially struggling to keep burying her outspoken comic persona. Her interactions with Jordan (Maria Bello), the prospective buyer for her company, are loaded with casual racism that she smiles through, like when she\u2019s praised for her \u201czen Buddhist\u201d vibe. Amy sees the sale of her company as an escape from such soul-sucking maintenance, a way for her to cash out and focus on raising her young daughter. But even in her personal life, she goes unheard \u2014 George cuts her off before she can even explain the road rage incident.<\/p>\n

On some level, the characters can trace repression back to their families. Amy says as much about her quiet Midwestern upbringing, whereas Danny notes that he, as the eldest son, shouldered the bulk of his parents\u2019 demands. As in so many Asian American stories, the protagonists labor beneath a cloud of generational strife. But repression is as much heaped upon them through the societal stereotype of the model minority, the ones who keep their heads down and never make a fuss \u2014 the very behavior that Danny rages against in the first episode, and the very expectation that countless Asian Americans are confronted with throughout their lives.<\/p>\n

As Beef<\/em>\u2019s conflict spirals out of control, it places its characters in a pantheon of TV antiheroes. The self-actualizing arc of its characters and the collateral damage they leave behind plays like a sort of low-stakes Breaking Bad<\/em>, with the pettiness and discontent unobscured by any climactic drug-dealing drama. We understand Amy and Danny, perhaps even rooting for their success on occasion, and Beef <\/em>accesses that empathy without needing to make them particularly likable or sympathetic. The series dismantles stereotypes by giving its characters such depth, revealing the humanity underneath. And humanity, Beef<\/em> recognizes, is often messy, angry, and imperfect.<\/p>\n

\n